MEMBERS OF THE BOARD OF TUTORS

Stern, Bodo, Ph.D.

FAS Center for Systems Biology, Harvard University

I was a Senior Scientific Editor at Cell for four years before joining the FAS Center for Systems Biology as the Director of Research Affairs in October, 2006. I am now helping to run the Bauer Fellows program and to grow the scientific community at the Center.

The remarkable progress in the life sciences is largely due to the success of molecular biology, which has helped to identify and characterize components of many biological pathways. We are now at a point where comprehensive "part lists" are available, but despite this advance, we are still far from understanding, let alone predicting, cellular and organismal behavior that results from the interaction of these parts. The emerging area of systems biology is an approach that integrates the available molecular information into a description of biology as a system. The long-term goal of systems biology is to define organizing principles that explain how complex behavior in cells and organisms arises from interacting components. The explosion of biological data, the increased computational power to analyze these data, and new theoretical and analytical tools from physics and engineering will get us closer to achieving this goal.